Denys Wilkinson

The Denys Wilkinson Building, part of the Department of Physics at Oxford University.

Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson FRS (5 September 1922 – 22 April 2016) was a British nuclear physicist.

Life Wilkinson was born on 5 September 1922 in Leeds, Yorkshire and educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1943.

After wartime work on the British and Canadian Atomic Energy projects, he returned to Cambridge in 1946, where he was awarded a PhD in 1947 and held posts culminating as Reader in Nuclear Physics from 19561957.

In 1957 he went to the University of Oxford as Professor of Nuclear Physics, and won the Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize the same year. In 2001 the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Oxford, which he had helped to create, was renamed the Denys Wilkinson Building in his honour.

Wilkinson served as chairman for both the Physics III Committee and the Electronic Experiments Committee at CERN.

On leaving Oxford, he served as vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex from 1976 to 1987.

His papers are held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. In 1980 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden.